What the poem does
The Rāmāyaṇa establishes beyond doubt that Sītā was not touched — it says so, it shows a year of refusal in the aśoka grove, and it supplies a curse that made it impossible for Rāvaṇa to force her. Having established it, the poem then has its hero repudiate her in public, have her walk through fire, and, in the last book, abandon her pregnant in a forest on the strength of a washerman's remark.
The epic does not present these as failures of information. Rāma says he knew. The reasons he gives are about what a king owes the opinion of his subjects.
The tradition's discomfort
The whole history of the Rāmāyaṇa's retelling can be read as an attempt to manage this material.
The Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa, followed by Tulsīdās, introduces the shadow Sītā — the real one enters fire before the abduction and a likeness is taken — which removes the question entirely and turns the ordeal into a restoration. Kamban and much of the southern tradition end at the coronation and never reach the banishment. The Jain versions have Sītā refuse to return and take monastic vows. Bhavabhūti's play gives Rāma an anguish the epic withholds. Folk versions, particularly the women's songs of Mithilā, Awadh and the Telugu country, are frequently on Sītā's side and say so.
The modern literature
From the nineteenth century onward the banishment has been the single most rewritten episode in Indian literature. There is a large body of work in Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi and English, much of it by women, that takes Sītā's part, gives her the narration, or ends the story with her refusal. Some of it is devotional and some furiously not.
What all of it has in common is the assumption that the material is a problem. That assumption is not modern. It is present in the epic itself, which gives Sītā the last word twice and lets her use it to refuse.
The pattern
Three episodes make up the problem: the repudiation and fire after the war, the banishment in the seventh book, and the final summons to swear again. They are not the same act. The first is public and instrumental; the second is private, deceitful and inflicted on a pregnant woman; the third is a demand for a repetition, and it is the one she refuses.
Each is justified by Rāma on the same ground — what a king owes his subjects' opinion — and the epic never puts any other reason in his mouth.
The women's tradition
The song traditions of Mithilā, Awadh, the Telugu country and elsewhere, sung by women at work and at weddings, are the largest body of Rāmāyaṇa material anywhere and are considerably less deferential than any written text. In them Sītā complains about her husband, her mother-in-law and her exile in the first person.
This material is oral, mostly unrecorded before the twentieth century, and it establishes that popular sympathy for Sītā against Rāma is not a modern development.
Further reading
- Bose, Mandakranta. The Ramayana Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2004
- Bose, Mandakranta. A Woman's Ramayana: Candravati's Bengali Epic. Routledge, 2013
- Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009
- Goldman, Robert P. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India. Princeton University Press, 1984
- Nagar, Shanti Lal. Genesis and Evolution of the Rama Katha in Indian Art, Thought, Literature and Culture. B.R. Publishing, 2005
See also
- Sītā — Sītā is the wife of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa, found by King Janaka in a furrow, carried off by Rāvaṇa and held for a year in Laṅkā without yielding, and vindicated by fire only to be abandoned by her husband in the epic's last book.
- The agni-parīkṣā — The agni-parīkṣā is the passage in the Rāmāyaṇa in which Rāma, after winning the war, repudiates Sītā before the army — and she calls for a pyre herself and walks into it.
- The banishment of Sītā — The banishment of Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa's seventh book is Rāma's decision, on hearing that his subjects doubt her, to have his pregnant wife taken to the forest and abandoned there.
- Rāma — Rāma is the prince of Ayodhyā at the centre of the Rāmāyaṇa, exiled for fourteen years by his father's promise, and worshipped across the Hindu world as an incarnation of Viṣṇu and the model of righteous conduct.
- Uttara Kāṇḍa — The Uttara Kāṇḍa is the seventh book of the Rāmāyaṇa, covering Rāvaṇa's ancestry, the banishment of the pregnant Sītā, the birth of Lava and Kuśa and Sītā's return into the earth — generally held with the first book to be a later addition.
- Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa — The Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa is a Sanskrit retelling of the epic embedded in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, which reads the story as Vedānta and treats Rāma as the supreme reality — the direct source of much that is familiar from later devotional versions.
- Rāmcaritmānas — The Rāmcaritmānas is Tulsīdās's retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa in Awadhi, begun at Ayodhyā in 1574, and the most widely recited work of North Indian devotional literature.
- Paumacariya — The Paumacariya is Vimalasūri's Prakrit retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa from a Jain standpoint, in which Rāvaṇa is a vidyādhara king rather than a demon and Lakṣmaṇa, not Rāma, kills him.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.